Handspring Teaming Up With Orange on New Design

Handspring has signed a contract with French telecom company Orange SA to develop a new device that will be more phone-like, but will us the Palm operating system. Orange was the first carrier to deliver a Microsoft Smartphone based device, the Orange SPV. The new device will run Palm OS 5, the most current version of Palmsource's Palm platform. This is a change from Handspring's trend of not using the latest and greatest OS.

The source article claims that this is a make or break proposal for Handspring because the phone-PDA class device that they have staked their business on is "not winning the market". I disagree. I believe we are still in the early stages of the pdaPhone market, and I believe that the market will continue to grow and expand into the traditional PDA and mobile phone markets.